“Hold on.” I heard Calahan walk across the room. “You’re up,” he murmured, and there was the sound of a soft kiss. Then I was put on speaker.
“What do you need?” asked Yolanda.
I fiddled with the paper, nervous. “I need to know all the calls this phone number made.”
“Pfft,”said Yolanda. “Easy. Read me the number.”
“I’m a fugitive,” I stressed. “If they find out you helped me, you could go to jail.”
“What are friends for? Now read me the number.”
I read it out. I heard Yolanda’s fingers skittering across the keyboard, then a final, triumphant thump of the Enter key. “Easy,” she told me. “Got a list of names and addresses. I’ll send it over.”
I slumped in relief. “Thanks, Yolanda.”
Calahan came back on the line. “This Grushin guy sounds like bad fucking news. You want me to jump on a plane?”
I nearly had a heart attack. “No!Jesus, no, Sam, don’t come to Chicago. You could lose your job just for talking to me!”
“Okay, okay,” he grumbled. “But Alison? Be careful.”
45
GENNADIY
At first,I thought I was dreaming. I had dozed off right in the middle of the shopping mall, and I was having a nightmare. Any second, I’d wake up.
But no. Grushin was right there, ten feet away, and coming closer. His gray business suit matched his silver beard, the deep red tie like a slash of blood on his chest. He was in his early sixties, but he’d kept all the muscle he’d picked up in the military, and he had a lean toughness, like he considered fat a weakness.
I blinked, trying to process.He’s here. He’s right here.It wasn’t just that he’d tried to have Alison killed, or that he’d murdered Mikhail’s old lover. He was the arch enemy of all Bratva: it was like seeing the devil himself walking the earth. I felt the comforting weight of my gun in its holster.I can kill him. I can kill him right now, and he can never hurt anyone again…
Except I couldn’t. We were right in the center of a shopping mall, and I could count at least four security cameras. Not even Conrad the wonder-attorney could get me off if I executed someone on video. But Grushin couldn’t kill me, either. He must have tailed me from the mansion and waited until I was in a public place.
He was here to talk.
I slowly sat down at one of the food court tables. Grushin sat down across from me. He gazed at me with undisguised contempt, like he was still the noble cop the media had portrayed him as, and I was the criminal trash that needed cleaning up. And I glared right back at him, the raw hate boiling up inside me.
It was funny, but when I’d first met Alison, I’d thought I’d hated her. Now I knew what real hate was. This man was everything I’d assumed she was: corrupt and uncaring, part of a broken system. And what he claimed to be, the honest, noble cop? Alison actually was that. Only she’d wound up framed and on the run, and he’d wound up a rich man.
“Gennadiy Aristov.” He spoke in Russian, and he had the tone of a teacher disciplining a pupil. “It was always a regret that you and your brothers fled the country like rats before I could catch you.”
“We didn’t flee,” I said testily. “We came to the land of opportunity.”
Grushin leaned closer. “You were last on my list. Do you know why?” He smiled. “You’ve never been real Bratva. You have no heritage. Your parents, your grandparents, they weren’t in the brotherhood. You’re just three brats who decided you were going to be gangsters. And then you pulled your fool of an uncle in to join you.”
I knew he was using spy tactics, trying to get in my head, but it still stung a little. Once, I’d thought Alison was my nemesis but now I saw that it was Grushin. He was the opposite of me in every way: coldly emotionless where I was angry, solitary where I relied on friends and family.
“Still, I’m willing to offer a deal,” Grushin told me. “I’ll leave the Aristovs alone. You can keep your businesses. I won’t touch you and your brothers. You can keep what you have.” He sat back in his seat. “All you have to do is hand over the woman.”
I felt the anger surge inside me.The woman. He wouldn’t even dignify her with a name. But I was confused, too. Early on, he’d tried to kill her because she was the only one who knew he was alive. Butnow I knew, and all my brothers. Killing her wouldn’t keep his secret. So why did he want her?
It didn’t matter because the answer was simple. “Go fuck yourself,” I told him.
He put his fingers lightly on my arm, and it was like a spider was walking there. “If you don’t, I will take your empire apart, piece by piece. I’ll smash you like I smashed the gangs in Moscow. Every business, gone. Every deal, undone. And I’ll come for your family, Gennadiy. Everyone you care about. Nowgive me. The woman.”
And this time, I heard it. He was so masterfully deceptive, that he almost kept it out of his voice…but not quite. There was a trace of stress when he talked about her.
He was scared. Not of our family, with its guns and power and billions. He was scared of her. So scared, he was willing to leave the Aristovs alone, just to get her off his back.
